Managing and Communicating with 750 Remote PCs
“In each of our franchised stores located across the country there are
two Windows-based systems that we need to manage and maintain,”
explains Steve Howard, Senior Analyst at Chick-fil-A. “There is a
point-of-sale system – the system that powers the registers – as well
as a back office system that captures and maintains store sales,
inventory and customer receipt information. We actually capture the
data for every customer transaction.”
To ensure continued, effective store and corporate operations, there
must be easy, transparent and reliable bi-directional communication
between the restaurant and corporate systems. Store operators rely on
corporate to keep their register systems current in terms of available
food items, special offers and pricing. They also rely on corporate to
manage their onsite PC systems to ensure they are properly configured
and that their software and applications are up-to-date and secure.
Chick-fil-A corporate, in turn, requires the ability to electronically
distribute, monitor and maintain restaurant systems to ensure
consistency across the restaurant chain, make certain that restaurant
systems are running as intended and to have easy access to restaurant
data in order to make appropriate business decisions.
“We’re talking about managing and communicating with some 750 remote
PCs in our restaurants across the country,” says Howard. “Adding to
that challenge is the fact that there are regional variations in our
critical profitability benchmarks. That’s meant that we’ve had to
maintain about ten different groups in our central database, and to
update store systems according to those market groupings. You can
imagine how cumbersome that can get. Using our previous remote
management system, we had to maintain ten separate workstations here at
corporate to make sure that we got those updates right.”
Chick-fil-A’s IT department also found that its previous system limited
the number of transmissions per day between restaurants and corporate
and often ran very long sessions. While on a typical day, communication
between restaurants and corporate averaged a few megabytes of data, a
software update such as the installation of Microsoft Windows XP
Service Pack was about 120 megabytes and took quite a long time to
download to the restaurants’ PCs.
“We Needed a More Efficient System”
“We clearly needed a more efficient system to communicate between our
corporate and restaurant systems,” explains Howard, “both in terms of
routine data that had to pass back and forth between the restaurants
and our central systems and in terms of distributing regular software
updates.”
Howard’s department drew up a list of requirements to establish the
criteria for its search for an improved remote management system. These
included the ability to:
- send and receive files to a client,
- allow large files to be sent over the course of several transmissions,
- re-start a file transmission after disconnection from the server so that the entire file did not have to be re-sent,
- schedule transfer sessions to allow specific client groups to connect at specified times,
- initiate on-demand outbound sessions to push out critical fixes and updates as needed,
- automate execution of programs on the client or server,
- track and report security patches that have/have not been applied to each client,
- generate packages to send and install patches to clients,
- specify how and when patches are applied on each client,
- perform silent installations,
- track and report hardware inventory, and
- log hardware changes when these devices are swapped or replaced.
Information Anywhere Afaria: Key Ingredient for Success
As Chick-fil-A researched possible replacements for its existing remote
management system, it realized that there was only one product that
provided the functionality it required – Afaria, part of the
Information Anywhere suite from Sybase iAnywhere. “Information Anywhere
suite was the only solution we found that met our needs for managing so
many distributed computers,” says Howard. “Not only did it provide
improved send and receive functionality that streamlined operations
both in our restaurants and here at corporate, but it ensured the
delivery of files and updates, even if we experienced a server
disconnect. Afaria also enabled us to easily manage our multiple
regions. We no longer have to run and maintain 10 separate
workstations, which has made things much easier for our developers and
other IT staff.”
“Afaria has given us a lot more flexibility in how we communicate with
our stores,” Howard adds. “We’re able to split up the overnight
sessions we run more intelligently and it provides us with a much
better user interface. And for our restaurant operators, it has freed
them from the business of keeping their systems up-to-date, allowing
them to focus on running their restaurants. Across the board,
implementing Afaria has been a real win for us.”
